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Coming up on this edition of Tennessee Life, we go back in time at the Smoky Mountain Heritage Center to learn about Bill Walker, a frontiersman who spun his own mythology about himself and his famed rifle.

Old death.

My impression of black Bill Walker is that he he helped some of his mythological status himself.

You know, he was he was quite the storyteller.

Slithered on down to the Show Me Reptiles Expo in Knoxville, where you can meet, hold and take home your choice of snakes, lizards and other scaly critters.

It's definitely kind of a subculture that we've been working really hard to make a mainstream thing.

You know, I've always said it for years.

My goal is to kind of put reptiles in every house in the United States.

Plus, we get straight to the point with the Cave Fencing Club to learn the ins and outs of this historic sport and how today's generation has come to embrace it.

Starting fencing is brutal, especially if you're going against people who have been fencing for a long time.

It's a skill based sport and everyone will be better than you and you will continue to lose and lose and lose until you finally win.

And that's the most satisfying part that that first win.

It's the.

It's what keeps you going.

And those stories.

Next on Tennessee Life.

Thanks for joining us on this edition of Tennessee live.

I'm Vicki Larson.

The Kentucky long rifle was a tool that played a pivotal row in the exploration and development of the Great Smoky Mountains.

Along with its practical uses for hunting, then protection, these rifles would grow to be synonymous with the man who utilized Sam and Morris legendary as Blackbeard Walker and his famous gun.

O Death.

It was a very rural area.

At least a day's ride from the nearest town.

So people had to be very self-sufficient because they just couldn't pop into town and run to the store for something they needed.

I took a different type of person to live in an area like this.

The Great Smoky Mountains Heritage Center preserves Smoky Mountain history through artifacts and buildings.

We have 17 historic structures, as well as artifacts dating back 9000 years up through the coming of the National Park.

I fell in love with history when I was a little kid, and it's because of the stories.

And the older I've become, the more I realized that the same is true.

It's all about the stories and artifacts like old death help to tell those stories.

When you hear about these larger than life characters, that's one thing.

But when you can see a tangible object that was connected with that person, it really helps bring that story to life.

William Marion Walker Black.

Bill Walker was an individual who lived here in the Smoky Mountains in the Townsend area, and he was born in 1838 and died in 1919.

He was first married right before the Civil War to Nancy Keller and started a family there soon after the Civil War.

He did marry two other ladies, Marion more and more Stinnett.

He raised all of those families together, which is a little bit uncommon.

But he considered himself of the Mormon sect, even though his father was a Presbyterian minister.

So like Bill Walker, who was probably considered bigger than life today, much of an iconic individual, he was a very large property owner and sold timber.

But he did all kinds of things from raising bees to farming to helping raise a community basically related to many of the Walker families here in Walker Valley.

One of the important things I think that he did was he left a legacy of family here that's remembered by the community.

His own death is the iconic rifle, along with the accouterments that followed with the rifle, the powder horn, the powder major, the bag, those sorts of things.

The rifle o death was named all death because of bagging of game that he bag not necessarily individuals but the he's he was very astute and capable of taking a game with that rifle which he did.

I think it was somewhere over a hundred Bears painters or panthers wildcats and and deer alike that he took with that rifle.

This is a muzzle loading wrath.

Everything that goes out the barrel has to go down the muzzle first.

So, uh, powder from the powder horn was poured in, measured, precise, nicely with a measure.

And this measure made by William Walker with his initials.

And after the powder goes down, in this case, was a 58 caliber.

And what you just witnessed was something that commonly occurred.

This is not a flawless process.

Anything can happen.

So dropping a ball in the woods is a little more trouble than dropping out on carpeted floor.

But we know that this was so the way of life then.

Kentucky Long rifle is a very easy to use firearm, but it takes a lot of little tools and accouterments and a lot of practice to to be proficient with that.

You remember many of these rifles were built right on the frontier.

I don't and I don't mean just barely across the mountains in Virginia in their day, but all the way into eastern Tennessee.

And they were made from or that was mined right here and forged and refined and wood came right from the area in which they live.

Maple and walnut being the choice.

But the other fruit, woods and hardwoods use characteristics here and hardware.

I mean, very crudely done, he's trying to really dress it up on a fancy rifle.

But all of these pieces are copper instead of brass.

You see how crudely they're made.

Anyone that moved this area from 1770s to 1825 was a pretty self-reliant person.

That was willing to risk everything to live the way they wanted to and maybe to strike it rich.

Yeah, there was always chances of prospecting and finding gold or silver.

And then there's also the whole opportunity of developing land and then reselling it.

This was a real commercial activity then.

And so while this area attracted many people.

Plus it was the it was the West, then it was the furthest west civilization of the day.

And so that's always has allure for for some people.

But I was in one of our historic structures one day doing some living history, and a man walked in, asked to speak to me and asked if I was familiar with Bill Walker and Old Earth.

And I said yes.

And he said, Well, I've got it.

And at that point, it was a lost rifle.

Nobody knew where it was.

And as a curator, you tend to be really skeptical when you hear things like that.

It's a bit like saying George Washington slept here.

You know, you want to say prove it.

So he started telling the story of his grandfather, who actually had gone to Walker Valley as a fairly young child with his mother, and they were trapped due to the weather.

It was snowing.

And so they stayed with Bill and Nancy Walker that night.

And Bill Walker spent the night telling this kid his famous hunting stories, his amazing hunting stories, and old death was hanging there above the fireplace and the kid grew up, went to college in New York, started his career there, and was walking down the street one day and saw an advertisement for an auction of black male Walker's items featuring old death.

And he went to the auction and bought it.

And it stayed in his family until it came to us two years ago.

So without saying anything about the conversation from the man who claimed to have old death, I actually approached Randall and said, What do you know about what happened to Old Earth?

And he said, We don't know a whole lot except that we lose track of it somewhere in New York.

And so that's kind of when my heart started pounding.

I thought, okay, so there's at least a connection there.

Somebody knows that one of Bill Walker's children took it to New York, and that is the last we hear of it.

One of his sons took it to New York and sold it there.

Once we actually received the rifle, we saw some some of the other items were actually marked with Bill Walker's initials.

He had carved them into some of the pieces that that he had created.

Also, from looking at the photographs, the existing photographs of old death with Bill Walker actually holding it, we compared those with the rifle.

All the measurements match there.

Also stories that Bill Walker made the rifle, but it was also used at the Battle of Kings Mountain in the American Revolution.

So once again, Ben and Randall came in handy because they noticed that the barrel itself is like the revolutionary era.

But everything else seemed to be from a later period, so likely made by a male walker.

My impression of black male walker is that he he helped some of his mythological status himself.

You know, he was he was quite the storyteller.

And that's what makes it so fun.

He's he's exceptional in the true sense of the word.

And so that's what I love about folks like you, Bill Walker, is that he just has a lot of stories around him and made sure of that, you know, So he made sure that it became this larger than life character.

Later on, Tennessee Life, the Utah Fencing Club takes us behind the blades to see first hand just how fun fencing can be.

But first, we meet some reptiles that you might want to take home with you if it slithers, crawls or has scales.

You can bet your bottom dollar that show me reptiles will have one for sale and a vendor willing to teach you why you shouldn't fear these incredible critters, but embrace the uniqueness of a cold blooded pet and I think a lot of people have grown up hearing like, oh, you know, reptiles are disgusting.

You know, they're slimy, they're going to hurt you, they're going to eat you.

And like all those things, it's just it's bogus, Like it's not true.

And I think when people figure that out, that that curiosity, because everybody's always curious about like what they're afraid of.

And once they get over that, they're all in like.

And that's how we build communities like this.

I think people are really surprised when they start to realize that every reptile, they're like people, like they have their own personalities and and habits and things like that.

Like, that's one of my favorite things about keeping reptiles is I love observing them and they all do.

They have their own personality, They have attitudes, like there's a lot going on in their little heads that I don't think people understand, you know, because they all have their good days and bad days, just like we do.

I have a huge passion for reptiles.

And so as a little kid, I actually wasn't allowed to keep reptiles, but we always had like birds and fish and stuff like that.

And I'd always catch like snakes and lizards outside and bring them into the house.

That's what drives everything that I do is my passion for the animals.

So now this is a reticulated python.

These guys are super cool.

They also get, you know, pretty big, but they're more of a slender snake.

You know, these guys get up to about 16 feet as well.

You know, common misconception of these guys is, you know, they get so big and they're going to eat you or eat eat all the animals in your neighborhood and stuff like that.

It's just absolutely not true.

A lot of times they just want to hang out in their house and be left alone.

That was breeding reptiles and I was doing a lot of educational shows.

That's really why I started this is I just wanted to spread, you know, how much I enjoyed the reptiles to other people.

So and I was finding other reptile expos and I just wasn't really happy with them, you know, like I felt like they could do more with it.

This is our 10th year of doing this.

So, you know, I started doing a reptile expo in Saint Louis and it took off.

And after a couple of years, I just started putting all over the country.

So I was I was wondering, you know, so we have a huge team of people now that help put these together.

On any given weekend.

We could be at eight different events in eight different cities in the country.

We've got a lot going on.

We've got stores all across the United States now.

We've got these shows.

I'm pretty sure we're coast to coast now with the reptile Expos.

You know, the number one driver is is that passion in wanting to grow the reptile industry.

You know, so it's definitely sea ball pythons.

Ball pythons are like the number one pet reptile in the United States.

You know, you've got bearded dragons, you got leopard geckos, you got crested geckos.

Are sometimes they're species of monitors.

Really.

You can see any kind of reptiles.

It's legal to own.

So this little guy is a bearded dragon.

These these guys are from Australia.

It's a pretty commonly kept lizard.

You know, they, they primarily eat like greens, you know, like collard greens and mustard greens and they do brooches and crickets and they've actually got quite the personality.

They make great pets.

They've got a personality like a puppy dog.

So they're super cool.

You know, we oftentimes suggest these to, you know, families that, you know, they might have pet allergies or something like that because they're going to get just as much enjoyment out of a little bearded dragon as they are with a small dog.

Oh, and he's he's one to go explore.

So I'm going to put him back for he jumps out of my hand.

Oh, yeah.

It's definitely kind of a subculture that we've been We're working really hard to make a mainstream thing, you know, I've always said for years my goal is to kind of put reptiles in every house in the United States.

I think fear and curiosity really brings people into it.

And I've seen it so many times, like whenever I'm working with somebody who is like an animal, they're scared, they're so scared.

But then whenever they figure out that they don't have to be scared of it anymore, it's like something clicks in their head and they're just like, they're they want a reptile now.

They want a pet reptile.

Like, I was talking to a lady in there earlier.

She was afraid of snakes.

And I seen her walking around a little bit ago.

She had a pet snake.

So what I really hope is that our community has gained allies, less people being afraid of of the animals.

You know, that's that's the number one thing is just breaking those stigmas.

I would hope that, you know, maybe they take away a new reptile.

You know, it's it is fun.

You know, some of these enclosures that it's built for these guys, it's like you could stick a a part of the Amazon rainforest in your kitchen or living room or whatever.

What I always encourage people to do is come out, check it out, find something that interest you and just do tons of research.

And when we come back in three or four months, that's when you get a new reptile.

The visuals and fencing may hearken back to the age of the Three Musketeers, but the U. K Fencing Club knows this is a sport that could have a very bright future.

Holt Well, you got it.

Yeah, that's starting.

Fencing is brutal, especially if you're going against people who have been fencing for a long time.

It's a skill based sport and everyone will be better than you and you will continue to lose and lose and lose until you finally win.

And that's the most satisfying part that that first win.

It's the it's what keeps you going.

It truly is a feeling like no other.

Seeing yourself improve and being able to beat someone you weren't able to beat the day before is truly one of the most satisfying natural rights.

No, What and this is really taught me, I've always liked sports.

I did a little bit of combat sports as a kid with karate and jujitsu, but I've always wanted to fence.

But it was prohibitively expensive before I came to college and joining this club was an easy way to be able to get into the Olympic sport of fencing without spending an arm and a leg.

Additionally, this club has given me an incredible sense of community, which is something that's hard to find in a college as big as you take.

And it's really easy to meet people and have something to talk about because everyone here can talk about fencing.

I got very fast, all right?

I started off fencing here, not knowing what sort of wanting to fence or really knowing if I wanted defense at all.

But our club here does the first three weeks where everyone tries all three different weapons.

We start the first week with second week with foil, third week with saber and everyone fences all those three weapons and is introduced to the court rules.

And you decide after that week what weapon you want to fence.

I ended up deciding on it because I loved the style and love for the people teaching me.

In here we have student coaches who have been fencing at the club for about four years who are really helpful and pretty skills competitively, who were able to get me from a complete beginner fencer to a all right fencer in about two years.

Oh, more about how to.

All right.

Yeah, you're 352.

There's three different types of fencing, three different weapons, if you want to call them that.

There's the abbey, which I would say is the most approachable and intuitive weapon.

F a It's just very intuitive.

Whoever hits first gets the point.

Very simple.

You can hit anywhere on the body as long as you hit with the tip of the blade and saber, you can hit from the waist up.

So, you know, arms and torso and you can hit with the tip of the blade or you can hit with the side of the blade.

And overall, the foil is the most restrictive.

I'd say you can only hit on the torso.

And like when you wear a fencing mask, it's a little bit of a part on the like bib of the mask.

You can hit it in foil, you can only hit with the tip of the way.

So that's pretty restrictive, but it's a lot of fun.

I, I find foil to be the most fun.

Don't tell the judges there's also in foil and saber was a right of way rule which in like simplest terms I guess you could say is basically if both fencers hate each other at about the same time, then whoever had control the action gets the touch.

So whoever was the one making an attack or the one being attacked, they can kind of put the blade out of the way and then the other touch.

So whoever just has the most control over what's happening has the right away and they get that done.

But that's not a thing you can just hit whenever, wherever you get the tension.

Oh one, it's usually two different lengths about you'll either do a five touch bout or a 15 touch bout and the five touch bouts.

I really just try to do moves that I know work best for me, try to just set up actions that I'm like very comfortable with and I have experience with in 15 touch bouts, you know, it's longer, you have a little bit more leeway to kind of try and figure out your opponent.

So you might just try and Batum with some things to see how they react.

And then based on their reactions, you can maybe try some things that you wouldn't normally do if you were as concerned about making sure you get the points as you may be in a fight.

That's about there's a little bit of leeway to kind of learn your opponent for a few touches and then really kick it in and try to be more casual about it.

I think the most essential things are the footwork.

So, you know, the basic rules are there's the old guard position where you kind of make a deal with your feet and then you take a like one foot length step forward with your front foot.

That's the way it's usually taught for motion that prevents backwards.

It's a retreat.

And then usually when you're trying to land a touch in their lunge, which, you know, just kind of kick your leg out, eat your arm out, and hopefully you land the touch.

I think the most fundamental blade work beyond just sending your arm would be a parry, which is where if the opponent is coming at you and they kind of start to reach out their blade to their touch, know just, you know, it's coming out, you'll just beat it out of the way.

And then the post, which is just after a parry, you go in and stick your arm out and they touch on the back right.

Okay.

I think the fencing community is actually really good.

Every time I go to a tournament or something I want to meet is really chill, really nice.

They're always, you know, we're always I'm always talking with competitors about, you know, oh, that move was really awesome.

How do you think I can improve this skill or whatnot?

So we're all, you know, everyone's just trying to get better and help each other out.

It's a very it's a very, like, good, supportive, communal sport.

And then the fencing club, it's a great community.

Everyone here is a great people, I think, which, you know, it's rare for in a group that's pretty big for everyone to be awesome.

But I really do think that everyone in this club, it's a it's all good people.

So I would just say, try it out.

It's fencing is something you've got to try for yourself to know if you like.

It's tough, but it's incredibly satisfying.

And from my experience, fencers are incredibly nice, caring people who are always willing to teach you something you didn't know before.

And it will be an incredible learning experience.

Our very first boxing library and we hope you've enjoyed this edition of the program.

I'm Vicki Lawson.

We'll see you on the next Hennessy Life.